Cluny Place is an Arts and Crafts terrace with half timber front elevations. At the rear there is a row of hipped single storey outshots, half of which belongs to each terraced house.
The brief was to form a garden room at the rear incorporating the outshot, as the Planning Department indicated that this was important to keep. The proposal uses traditional building materials but in a modern way, so that the original form is distinct from the new.
Building across the original kitchen window meant that it was important to introduce new roof glazing at the rear of the extension, giving light back into the kitchen. The client is delighted that she can still see her favourite tree from the kitchen looking through the roof lights.
Materials were chosen to be as natural as possible. The walls are constructed of timber frame, insulated with wood fibre boards and finished externally with natural sandstone. This construction is vapour permeable, and avoids the need for plastic membranes in the wall build up, leading to a much healthier internal environment.
A wall of storage was formed in the garden room with v lined timber boarding, housing a washing machine, desk space, freezer and much needed storage. A new kitchen was fitted and new shutters were introduced upstairs.
Plewlands Avenue is an unusual street of terraced 1920s houses with compact plans and some Arts and Crafts influences. The original ground floor layout had a very small galley-style kitchen and separate dining room at the rear of the house. A previous owner had added a garden room to make the most of the large south-facing garden and provide more living space, but this had been poorly built and insulated and its flat roof was now leaking.
The brief was to re-plan the layout of these rooms to create a spacious open plan kitchen/dining/living space for the family.
A large kitchen/dining room was achieved by removing the wall between the existing kitchen and dining room, with the kitchen work surfaces laid out in an L shape along the back walls of the room, leaving space for a large dining table. A red Aga that the client had in storage now sits in the old fireplace giving a splash of colour and warmth to the room.
The existing garden room was taken down, and a new larger sunny living room with pitched roof built, wrapping round the corner of the house. The original window and door openings were incorporated, minus their glass, so the kitchen/dining and living areas flow together creating a feeling of space with glimpsed views through from one room to the other, while retaining a degree of separation. The living room ceiling is open up to the pitched roof at its greatest height, adding to the sense of light and airiness.
The external walls of the extension are clad in natural cedar boarding, which will weather to a silvery grey over time. The timber finish was chosen to break up the rear elevation in a warmer material than harl, and reduce the scale of the lean-to roof. A big double glazed floor-to-ceiling screen wraps round the corner of the extension to catch the sun and ‘connect’ the garden and sitting room.
This house had previously been two terraced houses which were knocked together five years ago, when the family needed more room. Now, the existing conservatory, which had functioned as a play room, was leaky, cold and falling down. The kitchen was too small for the enlarged house and had a draughty plastic roof cupola. The clients decided to take down the conservatory, add a replacement extension and reconfigure the kitchen.
They wanted a flexible space, useable as a dining and garden room, and also for a study, play space and occasional guest room. The plan was a simple rectangle with a large sliding door which could be pulled across to divide the space into two. This is positioned on the line of the original boundary between the terraced houses, so that if the property is ever re-divided, each house gains a room.
The aim was also to build an energy efficient, low carbon extension that would be visually unobtrusive to the neighbours. This resulted in the choice of a sedum living roof, good for wildlife.
The walls are timber frame, insulated with wood fibre boards and clad in Scots larch, all renewable and locally sourced materials. This construction is also vapour permeable, and avoids the need for plastic membranes in the wall build up.
The old kitchen rooflight was removed, and the roof was reformed, insulated and covered in a sedum blanket. A new, south facing rooflight was introduced which catches the sunlight and produces solar gain, transforming what was previously a north facing room.
Craiglea Drive is a typical elegant, late Victorian mid terraced villa.
The owners wanted to convert the under used attic to form an additional bedroom and shower room, but without losing the feeling of grandeur and light of the original stair. A new stair was formed over the existing one, with a glass landing to allow light to flood down through the middle of the house as before.
The character of the original stair with its ornate cast iron balustrade was continued, alternating new decorative and plain cast iron balustrade balusters, to tie in with the original.
This A listed country house is composed of a main 17th century house with symmetrical flanking pavilions, linked to the house by stone screen walls. The owners wanted to glaze over the courtyard space between the house and the west pavilion, and to upgrade the pavilion to provide an estate office on the upper floor and a formal dining room and kitchen for estate events on the lower floor.
In order to retain the house’s symmetry it was essential that the new courtyard roof was completely hidden behind the screen wall. A crisp modern glass roof and simple oak stair with glass balustrade were inserted into the gap, deliberately contrasting with the old red sandstone walls. The new rooms in the pavilion were fitted out in a traditional manner to emphasise this contrast further. Sash and case windows from the dining room look out to the courtyard, now an ambiguously inside space. Salvaged materials such as stone flags and panelled doors were reincorporated into the new work. A new cloakroom was formed in the basement of the house, in traditional timber lining.
Mayfield Terrace is a substantial detached Victorian house on three floors, entered from the street at the middle floor level. There was no connection from this main living level to the beautiful large south-facing walled rear garden; and the basement level, originally servants’ quarters, had lots of small cellular rooms. The clients’ brief was to connect the living spaces better with the garden, and to open up the basement to link more to both the garden and the upper floor.
The existing basement stair was a straight narrow flight between two brick walls, arriving at an internal hallway. The stair, together with one flanking wall, was removed and replaced with a new oak open-tread stair set slightly away from the existing wall. Uplighters were set into the floor below to wash light up the wall to emphasise the gap and create a feeling of the stair floating. The removed wall was replaced with a glass screen. Walls were also removed downstairs to create a big games room and family sitting room, with direct access to the garden.
At street floor level the wall between the north-facing kitchen and sunny rear room to the garden was removed to form one large kitchen dining and family room. Two existing windows in the south-facing room were made into French doors, allowing sunlight to flood deep into the space. The French doors open onto a new delicately-patterned cast iron balcony from which a spiral stair leads directly to the garden, and also to a new terrace formed on top of the existing outshot basement room.
Finishes in the kitchen were deliberately chosen to maximise reflected light: kitchen units are white; the granite worktops sparkle; splashbacks are stainless steel, with spotlights over.
Middleby Street is an A listed 1820s Georgian end terraced house. There were two separate rooms at the rear, a dining room and kitchen. Listed Building Consent was gained to form a large opening connecting the two rooms together and the kitchen was swapped over to the larger of the two rooms.
While stripping out the old kitchen the original Georgian stone fireplace opening was rediscovered. Using another fireplace in the house as a model a new timber chimney piece was remade and a salvaged hob grate fitted – now a suitable focus to this room.
This Edwardian villa had been little altered apart from some electrical installations in the 1930s and a utility room in the 1960s. It has a typical ‘tartan’ plan with the stair and subsidiary rooms in the middle and the main rooms in the four corners. It also has a rear outshot housing the butler’s pantry, scullery and coal store with a maid’s room up a small stair above, typical of properties in this area, built at this time.
The main work involved creating a welcoming modern kitchen/dining space, amalgamating the existing kitchen and outshot rooms. The floor of the maid’s room was removed to form a lofty light-filled space and the wall between kitchen and outshot was removed to form one big room. The floor area of the room was increased, by taking down the North outshot wall, salvaging the stone, and rebuilding the wall 2 metres further out, thus creating the asymmetrical roof pitch.
Bathrooms, heating and electrics were all modernised and a new flight of stairs was added over the existing main staircase to a new large studio formed within the attic space. An original rotating summer house with cedar shingles was completely refurbished and sits in the corner of the large re-landscaped garden.
Bought as a holiday home, with glorious views at the front across the Inner Sound to Skye and Raasay, this tiny C listed terraced house had just two rooms downstairs and one upstairs. The brief was to fit two bedrooms, a shower room, a bathroom and a kitchen/dining/living room into this tiny space.
The solution was to put the living rooms upstairs where the views and light are best, and with judicious micro-planning, tuck bedrooms and bathrooms downstairs where the small windows were adequate.
Being C listed, the front of the house had to stay as it was, so the pitched roof was removed at the rear and replaced with an extended lead flat roof. A new kitchen/dining room was fitted out under the extended roof, with big French doors maximising light, opening onto a bridge leading to little timber terrace and the steeply sloping back garden beyond. Mirrors were added either side of the dormers at the front of the house to reflect light and to ‘extend’ the spectacular views to Raasay.
